Wednesday, July 9, 2008

In the past two days I've had eleven meetings, four excellent meals, and shared an elevator with McLovin. Thank god I skipped law school.

Visited my brother on Sunday near Santa Barbara. He and his wife have become master chef/gardeners. They grow almost everything they serve. I'm pretty sure they hand fused the hydrogen and oxygen in the water. In my family we usually evaluate meals with phrases like 'well, no one died'. This is high praise. 'Almost no one died' is more typical. 'I wish I were dead' is not unheard of. Their food produced comments like, 'edible', 'not hurting my pancreas', and 'seriously, this is so good I can't even feel my pancreas'. It made me proud.

Yesterday and today were a long blur of people punctuated by food I didn't have to pay for, which is my favorite kind (assuming it's pancreas friendly). I ordered 10 dollar doughnuts and eight dollar beers and tried to see how many table settings I could fit in my pants pockets. The word you're looking for is - classy.

Somehow they keep finding more hours in the day to put meetings. I had something like 28 when I got here. I'm up to 32 now. Apparently those nights of uninterrupted sleep don't come cheap. I've said the same things so many times that I sometimes begin and end an hour with the same story. A story about a young pancreas, just trying to make his way into every paragraph.

Kyle Killen...

... writes fiction and other nonsense. His work has appeared in Mcsweeney's, Salon.com, The Mid-American Review, The Berkley Fiction Review, The Black Warrior Review, and numerous other places ending in the word Review. He previously wrote letters to gestating children and even won an award once.

He now lives with a large number of women and cats, which is exactly as hip and exciting as you think it sounds.